Bath Girl Geek Dinners is back and we are enticing our members in for an informal pizza and meetup before BathCamp (which we’re sneaking into after 6.30) on the 10th May.

We will introduce ourselves, explain the aim of the group and give you all an overview of the support networks in the region for women in Bath working in the Tech Field.

Marianne Wise and Franziska Zuch have brilliantly agreed to take on the task of getting the Bath GGD on its feet which is great.

As we are only booked for the first hour we will concentrate on who’s doing what in the Bath area around the women in Tech

Marianne Wise is one of the new Bath Girl Geek Dinner organisors, she will introduce herself, what she does and her interest in women in tech

Fran Zuch is the other new Bath Girl Geek Dinners organisor and runs a meetup called Meet&Speak also for women who want to be more confident about speaking in public, in the workplace, at conferences, or at local meet ups.

Serrie Chapman to give an overview of the Womens Tech Hub, IT Girls Collaborative (run by Rosie Bennett above left) and Tech for Good (run by Annie Legge above right), which are all actively supporting women in tech in the area.

Paul Leader from BathCamp will hopefully pop his head around to introduce BathCamp to you, they have been very actively working to encourage female attendance to their meetups!

After that it will be a case of networking, pizza eating, wine drinking and finding out what our members would like us to find speakers for, subjects, suggestions, support (all the S’s it seems!)

When

Thursday 10th May 2018 5.30pm – 6.30pm

BathCamp starts at 6.30pm for those wishing to join BathCamp

Where

This meetup is kindly being hosted by the The Guild Hub co-working space in Bath

Sign Up

As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup) here Bath Girl Geek Dinners

We are very excited to announce that we will be having our first social for the year straight after the IT Girls Collaborative meet up on 8 March. Very informal, we’ll be heading to the Raven in Bath for a tasty pie and hopefully some good chat about the direction of the Bath Girl Geek Dinners. For this event, we don’t have a speaker booked but hope we can a debate about what we think is needed in Bath to take the vision of Girl Geek Dinners forward here.

The Girl Geek Dinners were founded on the 16th August 2005 as a result of one girl geek who got annoyed and frustrated about being one of the only females attending technical events. She was tired of being assumed to be marketing, tired of constantly having to prove herself and decided that she just wanted a change and to be treated just the same as any other geek out there, gender and age aside.

So what did this geeky girl do to change the world of geeks and girl geeks everywhere… well she got in touch with a few well known bloggers, posted online about her idea of getting geeks to educate one another over dinner and then arranged the first girl geek dinner event with a little help from her friends. The first event had 35 people at it all from London and the surrounding area, shortly after people started to hear about the events and companies started sponsoring them to cover the food and drinks cost.

Then they started popping up in other UK cities as she trained others up in how to run the events, spreading the formula for them… so they then started popping up in Europe… and shortly after that over in Canada… Now they are starting to pop up in New Zealand and Australia. Who knows where will be next

The Vision

The long term vision of these events is to bring Geek (or if necessary Girl Geek) Dinners into schools, colleges and universities around the world to encourage people to embrace their passion for something like technology and to explore what they can do with it. Even better will be doing this in countries where computers are scarce but valuable. Imagine groups of children around a laptop learning about the technology, getting all excited by it no matter what country they are in.

Why should you care?

The UK population of software engineers and technical expertise is diminishing; the amount of work in the UK for skilled technical staff is on the rise. The amount of women in the technical industry is less than 10% and the number of young women (and in fact men) applying to university for a technical degree course is dwindling. This pattern however is not just occurring in the UK but around the world. Why? This is partly due to social stereotypes (see work from Saatchi & Saatchi on Lady Geek), partly to do with university entry requirements (many which require A level maths as standard), and sometimes just in lack of self belief that people can do these roles successfully. Looking at a younger age group they see technology as dull and about sitting looking at a computer all day! We want to break down these myths about technology and the industry at large! Vive la Resistance!!

Technology has been one of those black arts for so many years and we think that it’s about time that these myths were broken down and the truth about them brought to light. Social stereotypes damaging the industry will be broken down, and it’s all about educating the media, the people and attracting social change. Along with this is the opportunity to make changes that can affect everyone, even those in the third world. It is an opportunity and one that I think would we well worth anyone who is up for a challenge to consider.

So see you on the 8 March, for a drink and a pie from 8pm. Please sign up to the meet up and RSVP for the event. By the end of the night we hope we’ll have the bones of an action plan for what we want to do for the women Geeks of Bath and its surrounding areas.

Bear with us, we have exciting news as we have some new Bath based organisors keen to set up and run the group. Anybody wishing to sponsor, host an event or help out in any way please contact us on bathgirlgeek@gmail.com.

We were very excited to have kicked off Girl Geek’s 10th Birthday year with a hands-on workshop on data hacking from the team at Bath:Hacked.

There was a drinks reception from 6.30pm to catch up with fellow Girl Geeks and welcome new faces to the group. Followed by a presentation, dinner and a hands-on workshop.

Knowing how to glean useful insights from data is becoming an increasingly important skill to have. Leigh Dodds from the Open Data Institute, who also plays an instrumental role in Bath:Hacked events, delivered a presentation and practical workshop on ‘hacking data’ to give us a taster of what’s involved in a typical ‘hack’, the skills involved and how to get started.

The one day event is a community focused conference for Ruby developers of all skill levels. There will be talks from some of the Ruby community’s favourite speakers from around the world, including Linda Liukas, founder of Rails Girls and Saron Yitbarek, founder of CodeNewbie.

The conference will take place in Bath’s Assembly Rooms on Friday 13th March and, since we’re running it as a non-profit event, tickets are just £99 + VAT with 10% of sales being donated to Shelter. Please visit the website for more details, including our Code of Conduct and accessibility statement.